This paper finds that firms' trade credit, the financing provided by upstream input suppliers along the supply chain, plays an important role in determining firms' exportation. In a panel data set of manufacturing firms in 25 Eastern European and Central Asian countries between 2001 and 2007, we...

Although economists have long been aware of Jensen's inequality, many econometric applications have neglected an important implication of it: estimating economic relationships in logarithms can lead to significant biases in the presence of heteroskedasticity. This paper explains why this problem...

(Why) do prices and inflation rates differ within the euro area? We study the relevance of a national border for grocery prices in the otherwise homogenous and highly integrated border region of Austria and Germany. Using transaction data on prices and quantities from a large household panel, we...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...